


Other Items of Interest

by Catchclaw



Series: Mental Mimosa [328]
Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Feelings, Feelings of the Sort That Arrive at Two AM, First Kiss, M/M, Pining, almost
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-05
Updated: 2020-04-05
Packaged: 2021-03-01 03:47:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,413
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23498485
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Catchclaw/pseuds/Catchclaw
Summary: A crush is so much easier to manage when you don’t actually like the guy.
Relationships: Rafael Barba/Dominick "Sonny" Carisi Jr.
Series: Mental Mimosa [328]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1012767
Comments: 9
Kudos: 82





	Other Items of Interest

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: 'You gotta stop doing that.' 'What?' 'Saying things that make me wanna kiss you.' Prompt from this [generator](https://colormayfade.tumblr.com/generator).

“You gotta stop doing that, counselor.”

“What?” An eyebrow, an ungentle jab of the pen. “Pointing out your mistakes? Please. Hand me something worth reading and I won’t have to.”

“No.”

It’s the way Carisi says it that gets Barba’s head up, pulls his eyes away from the (very) drafty draft he’d been handed not five minutes before and yet is already bleeding the shit out of his red pen, which is nothing new, right? Because this is how it goes between them: Sonny tries and Barba smacks him around and everybody emerges having learned something new--Carisi about the law and Barba about...other items of interest only to himself. The kinds of things he hoards in his head and spreads out to review again at home when he’s alone and the only light is that thin line between the window and the wall that the blackout curtains can’t keep back and when he thinks about Carisi, the bane of his existence and unknowing balm to Barba’s soul, that light is plenty enough.

The way Sonny bites his lip when Barba lectures him. The way his whole pretty face falls when he gets caught in a mistake. The way his hands flail when Barba pushes him, pretends to be unimpressed by a particularly gorgeous invocation of case law until Sonny forgets to be deferential (and who told him he had to be, anyway?) and raises his voice and fucking fights back.

He’ll call Barba by his first name then, when he’s pissed off. He’ll spit it out like an invective and flush all the way down his throat and Barba will lean back in his chair and fold his arms behind his head and think to himself _do not smile_ and file it away, the shade of Carisi’s skin above his collar when he’s mad.

“All right, all right,” Barba will let himself say eventually, raising his hands in defeat. “I see your point, Carisi. It’s not an argument I’d make myself, but I can appreciate why you’ve made it here.”

And Sonny will stop mid-holler and blink at him, and then break out this blinding grin. “Are you saying I’m right?”

“No, I’m saying we can agree to disagree.”

“Hey,” Carisi will say, settling back down in his chair and slurping at his cold coffee. “You know what? A draw's good enough for me.”

He’s an open book, this detective, and Barba wants nothing more than to fold the corners of some of Sonny’s pages down and keep them to himself. It’s ridiculous, but he’s lonely. Lonely and prickly and too old to live on coffee and scotch, to wake up in the middle of damnable night hungry for someone to touch. Especially someone who works for him, sort of, someone so eager and earnest and _tall_ , someone who tries not to get shot for a living, someone who somehow does what Sonny does and walks away from it kinder, more determined, no shade of cynicism in the least and if he didn’t want to press Carisi into the nearest, softest surface and find out what makes him moan, Barba likes to tell himself, he’d have shaken free of Sonny and his JD dreams a long goddamn time ago.

It isn’t true, but it makes him feel better; a crush is so much easier to manage when you don’t actually like the guy. 

But he does, and never more so than in these after-work sessions, when there are red-stained pages and takeout strewn all over his desk; when the shades are drawn and Carmen and her ilk are long gone and it’s just them and the sounds of the city, arguing over these snapshots of the law in their shirtsleeves, Carisi’s badge banging into the desk every time he leans forward to grab some fries or frown at his own work in the dim light.

“Crap,” he’ll say, salt on his lips and the heel of his palm on his forehead. “I missed something, right here. There’s precedent on this--I know there is, I read it--but I forget to add it in. You see that?

“I do,” Barba will say, something good and heavy turning over in his gut as Sonny’s tongue sneaks out and swipes his mouth clean. “Now what should you have written there? Ah, ah, no looking at your notes. You know it. I want to hear you say it out loud.”

A flick of lids and there are blue eyes in his, certainty at war with trepidation, still, which shouldn’t make him feel good, but it does. There’s something to be said for being feared.

( _And/or_ , that strip of light tells him at two AM when he wakes up hard and really fucking annoyed, _to be someone Sonny wants to impress_.  
  
He can ride that notion for a long time, some nights.)

But now, on this evening, in the dull light of his desk lamp, Carisi’s expression is one that Barba can’t read. His face is closed, a little; nigh on inscrutable; not angry, but nowhere near happy, either. He almost doesn’t look like himself--because he’s still, Barba realizes, not moving at all, not even his eyes. They’re in Barba’s own, and there they stay.

Barba sets his pen down and spreads his hands. “No, what? I’m not a mindreader.”

Sonny’s voice is calm, a lake without a ripple. “No,” he says, “I’m not talking about you marking up my shit.”

Which is both an answer and not an answer, Barba thinks; an attorney’s answer, one that begs another question and gives nothing away. Huh.

Barba’s not sure how he feels about that.

He likes that Sonny doesn’t usually obfuscate, that he wears his heart on his sleeve, or pinned on his chest like a fucking flag, whatever. He likes how much Carisi cares, that Carisi speaks his mind, that Carisi extends a hand first and asks for thank yous never. None of these things will make Carisi a successful lawyer because Carisi is not an asshole and all the top-shelf lawyers that Barba’s ever know including the one in his bathroom mirror are assholes, period. That’s just the way it is, and Sonny isn’t, and why the hell he wants to spend the rest of his life in the law, Barba can’t imagine except that Carisi’s got the mind for it, the smarts, this never-ending drive to learn and what he thinks he can learn here in the glow of a single goddamn lamp sitting at the desk of a man who aches to kiss him, to yank him from his chair and get him stretched long on the sofa and pop each and every button on his vest until there were only shirttails between Barba’s hands and Sonny’s skin and he would know then the kinds of sounds that Sonny makes when he feels good, when Barba’s making him, marking him, loving him and oh, what fortunes wouldn’t he trade for that kind of knowledge, that feeling of Sonny shaking beneath him, beaming, breathing?

“Fine,” Barba says. He cuts his eyes free and swallows. “Don’t tell me. You brought it up.”

When he looks back, Sonny’s biting his lip. And that cool voice is gone.

“Look,” Carisi says. “I’m trying to be honest with you here, ok? I mean, what I meant was: you gotta stop saying things that make me want to kiss you, Raf.”

The words hang in the air for a moment, hovering between the dark and the light.

Barba says, delicately:

“You want to kiss me?”

Sonny squares his shoulders and he looks, for a heartbeat, incredibly young. Dear God. Barba can’t breathe. He’s not sure he wants to.

“Yeah,” Carisi says. “Yeah, I do.”

Barba wants to ask _why_. He wants to ask _for how long_. He wants to ask if Sonny has laid awake in those uneasy hours before dawn too and reached beneath the sheets and thought about Barba licking at his mouth and holding his hands against the bed and filling him so full that neither of them can speak and if he’s come with Barba’s name in his mouth. There’s so much Barba needs to fucking know to frame the last few months in perspective, the back and forth of these late, ink-stained nights, but for now--

For now, Barba pushes back from the desk and holds out a hand to the man he adores and says: “Come here, _cielo_. Come here.”

**Author's Note:**

> No, I'm not binging old seasons of SVU thanks to quarantine. Of course not.


End file.
